Russian Dolls
by julielal
Summary: Trapped in Grimmauld Place, Sirius sets out to prove to the world and himself that he is a good person. A little Christmas spirit goes a long way towards mending fences and, hopefully, minds. AU OoTP. No slash, amazingly enough.


Title : Russian dolls

Summary : Trapped in Grimmauld Place, Sirius sets out to prove to the world and himself that he is a good person. A little Christmas spirit goes a long way towards mending fences and, hopefully, minds.

Rating : K

Note : This is actually an English version of a fic I wrote in French a couple of years back. As you can guess, I'm not a native speaker, so if anyone spots anything odd, let me know !

* * *

The month of November 1995 brought the Order icy rain and catastrophic news. Their only spy in the ranks of Lord Voldemort had lost his cover, and he had managed to get away with his life only by a stroke of outrageous luck.

Severus Snape had to flee Hogwarts and seek refuge in Grimmauld Place, which he was understandably disgruntled about. And he was not the only one. Sirius Black, in spite of his dire need for company in the mausoleum he called his home, would have dearly preferred to be left to wallow in his own misery in peace, thank you very much.

Even though they were remarkably careful never to cross paths, the mere presence of the other in the building grated on each man's nerves.

Snape spent most of his time either in the library or in a cellar that had been converted into a laboratory for the occasion. Every once in a while, he went back up to his room to get some sleep.

Meanwhile, Sirius passed time in Buckbeak's or a bottle of brandy's company, in the kitchen, the living room, or when he was feeling particularly maudlin, in his brother Regulus' room.

On one of those rare occasions when Remus wasn't gone trucking around Merlin only knew where, he was sitting in the kitchen with Sirius and a steaming teapot. Sirius, only too happy to have a friendly ear in which to pour his bitterness, couldn't seem to stop speaking.

« I can't stand him anymore. »

« He's only been here three weeks, » Lupin replied calmly. His voice was _always_ calm. It was nearly impossible to goad him into shouting. Sometimes, Sirius hated him a little for always being so reasonable, so grown up, so different from the twenty-two-year-old he remembered. It was unfair and childish, but Sirius had long ago realized that the adult personality he had developed was somewhat warped.

« Three weeks too many. »

« You never see him, Sirius. It's not as if he kept eating all your favourite biscuits and leaving crumbs in your bed. »

« You don't get it, it's the _principle _of the thing_. _Just knowing he's here drives me bonkers. »

When Remus didn't answer, Sirius looked up and met his gaze. What he saw there made him feel like his stomach was full of stones.

Pity.

Mixed with compassion, understanding, clumsily hidden behind a veil of exasperation, but pity nonetheless. If even Remus, who knew better than anyone how humiliating seeing other people pity you could be, was pitying _him_, he had fallen very low indeed. Sirius didn't meet his eyes, and for a few seconds, the silence was deafening.

« Sirius, » Remus' voice was gravelly, but so soft, so tender that Sirius had to clamp his jaws shut to stop himself from screaming. « If you really want to prove the world that you are different from the rest of your family, you'll have to give up some of their more unsightly traits. »

« What are you accusing me of, exactly ? » Sirius barked. His stomach was churning painfully, and he longed for silence and a stiff drink.

« Nothing. I'm just saying that you inherited a few things from your mother, like any other son on this planet. »

« And what would that be ? » Sirius asked, even though he was absolutely certain he would hate the answer.

« Hatred. »

Sirius could only stare at Remus, gaping.

« Your parents hated everything and everyone, including each other. If you let yourself become like them, they'll have won. »

« Are you telling me I need to go hug Snape or something ? »

Sirius had said that sentence lightly, clumsily trying to steer the conversation towards the more comfortable grounds of idle banter. He failed utterly, and Remus looked at him gravely.

« You've been telling me for twenty-five years that you're different from the rest of your family. Don't you think it's high time you proved it ? » He put his mug down on the table, stood up, and, unhurriedly, left the room, leaving Sirius alone in the kitchen.

* * *

The Blacks, like all the other great pureblood families, had a highly ritualized calendar. Each christian holiday, each birthday, each solstice had its own celebration, one that generally demanded weeks of preparations and required every adult in the vicinity to end up smashed out of their head.

Among all those family celebrations, Sirius felt only one was somewhat redeemable. Christmas had always been and remained a blessed reprieve for him, mainly because the whole household was so busy at that time of the year he could go for days on end without meeting his parents at all.

On the evening of the 30th of November, a large white and green stocking was suspended to the doorknob of the bedroom of every member of the family. In the stocking was a series of gradually smaller stockings, in the manner of russian dolls, and from the 1st to the 25th of December, a present was put inside it every morning. Thus, every December morning of his childhood, Sirius openend his door and went searching his chunky christmas stocking to find the smallest one, right at the bottom, and discover what his present was. It was never very expensive, or even very refined, and etiquette commanded that the present could be put to a practical use, but for a child, an attention is an attention.

Sirius hadn't thought about this tradition in years, but when he found a gaggle of old woolen stockings, faded and lumpy, while clearing out an old chest, he decided that it might be time for a little christmas spirit.

If Remus had been there, he would have been delighted to see Sirius take his time to think about what he was going to do. But Remus was gone, off somewhere in Cornwall with a pack of feral werewolves, and wouldn't be back for a couple of months.

He tried to remember what kind of presents he used to get as a child and found his memory disturbingly lacking. So he decided to fill the gaps with a little imagination.

As he had no access to shops of any kind, or even to a friend who would have enough time to buy a few things for him and enough tact not to ask questions, he would have to be creative. After all, the house was full of rubbish just waiting to be transfigured, and Sirius had always had a knack for transfiguration.

Although he didn't notice this, the mental exercise did wonders for his morale, and this unexpected burst of optimist spurred him into putting his plan into action.

The night between the 30th of November and the 1st of December, when only the creaking of the house settling into its foundations broke the cold and the silence, Sirius discretely attached the stocking to Snape's doorknob. In the smallest one, a ridiculously delicate little thing, he slipped what had been his brother's favourite treat, a crystallized orange segment coated with dark chocolate.

The next day, Sirius didn't see Snape. He hadn't expected to.

He would have liked to know if Snape had enjoyed his present, though. He had trouble seeing him as the kind of man who could appreciate a good bitter chocolate, but he was learning to let himself be surprised.

He didn't see him the next day, nor the day after.

The fourth day, while he was poring over his journal, cup of coffee in hand, a discrete metallic noise made him look up. Two small objects had been dropped on the table by a long pale hand, which was now crossed with its twin across a tightly buttoned chest, which in turn was topped by a hooked and disapproving face.

« Yes ? » Despite all his good intentions, Sirius had to force himself to be civil, and it was quite obvious.

« Pray tell what this is ? » asked Snape in a frosty voice with a haughty nod at the table.

« A pair of cufflinks. » Unable to stop himself, he added. « Funny, I thought you were the observant type. »

The night before, Sirius had dropped the present in the stocking with a faint feeling of triumph. The links were steel, because silver would have sent the wrong message, and also because putting silver on hands that spent most of their time above a cauldron was criminally stupid. Each of them was shaped like a tiny cauldron, so intricately detailed that even Mc Gonagall would have cracked a smile. No one would have guessed that just the day before, they had still been a ruler and and an old cupboard door's hinge.

There was a moment of silence during which Sirius pretended not to see Snape's openly inquisitive gaze. Then :

« What do you think you are doing, exactly ? » The tone was cold, but lacked the biting quality that usually marked all their conversations. It didn't seem to be a rhetorical question, so Sirius took his time to answer it. Between his reluctance to open up to Snape and his own confusion on the subject, he was faced with an unexpected dilemma. The silence stretched on for a full minute.

« I reckon I'm working on my karma. » He felt very proud when his voice came out perfectly steady. Without waiting for an answer, he got up and left the room. When he reached the door, he called out : « There's fresh coffee on the counter. »

When he came back in the kitchen a few hours later, the cufflinks had disappeared from the table.

* * *

The next morning, when Sirius went into the kitchen for breakfast, the house was just as empty and silent as usual. Sometimes, he craved noise so badly that he could have killed for a radio set or a simple record player. Anything to fill the gaping silence.

And that was where his latest present idea had come from. He seriously doubted that Snape would ever use the harmonica he had slipped in the stocking in the middle of the night, but thinking about Snape, barefooted, wearing blue overalls and a straw hat, slouching on the veranda of a southern Florida house and playing away was entertaining enough that Sirius had gone to bed sniggering to himself.

When he went to the counter to make a pot of coffee, he had a surprise. The pot was almost full and gently steaming, as if someone had taken the pain to cast a preserving spell on it. It had never happened before. If Snape ever ate breakfast, which Sirius seriously doubted, he never left a trace behind him, and certainly nothing that could be interpreted as a courtesy.

Sirius, although tempted, didn't cast a spell to check for the presence of a potion in the coffee and poured himself a cup. It was good. Much better than the one he made himself.

When he got up for a refill, the thought came to him that, maybe, Snape too was thinking about his karma.

* * *

Days passed, slowly, but made less empty by the constant challenge of finding new ideas for Snape that followed Sirius everywhere like a starved labrador. His days were almost entirely spent wondering what to make next, knowing that the present should be friendly, but not too chummy, precious, but not in terms of money, and had to be made from materials that Sirius could get his hands on.

He had never thought that he'd end up bald from pulling his hair out when he'd begun this project.

The end of the month was sneaking up. In three weeks, Sirius had seen Snape more than a few seconds in passing only once, at an Order meeting. They didn't speak a single word to each other, which seemed to relieve everyone. Their arguments were invariably oppressively venomous, and the atmosphere was bleak enough as it was. Their contact were limited to the occasional interrogative, perplex or thoughtful gaze Snape sent him.

The last few days, Sirius had noticed a multitude of small details which gave him a strange sense of satisfaction. The coffee, kept warm almost every morning. The candles in the library, replaced just when he noticed that they would need changing soon. The potions cupboard, always filled. Sirius greatly appreciated the lack of questions regarding the speed at which the sleeping potions disappeared.

Generally speaking, Snape had a thousand small opportunities to make life very difficult for Sirius and didn't make use of them. A month earlier, he would have done it without a second thought, but something seemed to have persuaded him to accept the peace offering. Or maybe he was taking this a simple exchange of good practices. Small attentions for elementary courtesy.

Sirius could hardly believe this was happening, whatever the reason.

Directly confronted with his behaviour, Snape would probably have draped himself in his wounded dignity and dropped one of his famous strings of scalding insults. Sirius knew this and understood, and he didn't mind the silence. He didn't particularly crave Snape's friendship, he only wanted to prove to himself that he could life without conflicts.

Molly Weasley would have had much to say about this. On the other hand, she always had something to say about everything concerning Sirius. He was toying with the idea of throwing her out of a window in the near future, and he knew for a fact that he was not the only one.

But despite his annoyance, his solitude, the memories that kept assaulting him at every corner, Sirius couldn't help thinking, deep down, that what he had christened in his head the Matrioshka-Snape Project definitely made his life easier to bear.

Who would have thought.

Surprisingly enough, Sirius managed to keep his little project up and running without anyone noticing despite his godson and an army of Weasleys invading his house. Snape seemed, for all intents and purposes, to have elected hermitism as his new way of life and almost never emerged from his room.

Sirius felt rather proud when the stress generated by Arthur Weasley's being attacked, the unavoidable chaos created by seven new permanent inhabitants, and the cheery mess that traditionally goes with end of year celebrations didn't manage to staunch his steady trickle of inspiration. Snape obviously already owned a potionist's scalpel, but the handle on this one was ivory, and finely engraved with tiny salamanders. Same thing for the self-cleaning tea strainer. You couldn't have a stroke of genius every day.

On christmas eve, Snape did not join in the festivities, and everyone seemed delighted not to see him come down for dinner.

Nevertheless, once they had all finished eating, Sirius left the teenagers to their game of Exploding Snap under Molly's watchful eye and discretely took a platter upstairs. Since he didn't know what Snape liked, he brought a bit of everything, even though he had trouble seeing his old nemesis planting an eager fork into Molly's delicious fudge Yule log.

He knocked three times on the door, put the platter on the floor, and turned to leave. But the door opened opened when he barely a step away.

« What on earth... » Crockery tinkled. « Black, what is this ? »

Sirius felt a surge of teenaged guilt rise up and squashed it quickly. « Dinner. We've got enough leftovers for ten, might as well make you participate. »

An elegant eyebrow rose. « You're too good, Black. » There again, his word peculiarly lacked in venom.

« You can thank my dear mother for my flawless breeding. Seriously, there's a ton of food down there, and what with it being Christmas and all, there's no need to let you fast. »

« And what makes you think I'm not following Lent ? »

Sirius emitted a rather rude noise. « If you're a catholic, I'm Stubby Boardman. » Snape obviously thought it better not to comment. « I'm off, good night. »

When Sirius was going to reach the staircase on his way down, he was surprised to hear Snape call out his name. Perplex, he turned. Snape was standing in the doorway, the platter in his hands and an unreadable expression on his face.

« Black ! »

« Yes ? »

A second of silence, then : « Merry Christmas. »

Sirius nodded and turned to the staircase, smiling faintly.

The next morning, Sirius was awakened by a stampede of feet in the corridor. Everyone was running to the Christmas tree. He got up, got dressed, and came out of his room. When he closed the door behind him, a soft thumping sound made him turn.

A red woolen stocking was hanging from his doorknob. It was full.


End file.
